(Please bear with me, this is not a topic that can be discussed in short pithy sound bites and popular talking points.)
Brothers and Sisters in the Lord God Almighty, we cannot even BEGIN to make a dent in the struggle for our Judeo-Christian culture that is waging between ourselves and the Secular Humanists UNLESS we have a working knowledge of HUMAN DIGNITY.
The Secularists that are trying to force God out of our culture will claim that human dignity was granted to society by a secular "Enlightenment" but they are wrong - either willfully revising history, or ignorantly repeating indoctrinated hear-say.
Instead we Christians (and Jews!) MUST understand that Human Dignity has its roots in the understanding
that man is made in the image and likeness of God. As found in Genesis 1:27
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."
Furthermore we MUST understand that we uphold Human Dignity because, as then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger put it so well:
"We act in liberty and equality as if we were all sons of God; we respect each other as if we were made in the image of God; we love one another as if we were responding thereby to an order given by God." (Cardinal Ratzinger, "Christianity and the Crisis of Culture, pg. 21)
Today the Secularists that wish to divorce the Judeo-Christian culture from our society repeatedly appeal to The Enlightenment. But make certain and remember that the Enlightenment first took place from
within the framework of the Christian world view. This is important to understand because the Secularists are trying to revise history while claiming that the Enlightenment was godless and secular. But it was anything but as evidenced by the fact that the Enlightenment swiftly led to the American Revolution, with its declaration that:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Because our unalienable Rights
are granted by God it is the Judeo-Christian understanding that NO ONE has the authority to make Human Dignity
conditional. ALL people enjoy their Human Dignity from conception to natural death
regardless of their physical or mental state.
And because of this, the most vulnerable in our society are
not considered a "burden" and an "inconvenience" that must be disposed of, gotten out of the way, "useless eaters" that are a "burden on society." No, because their Human Dignity lies in the fact that all human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and that it is GOD Who grants that dignity, we have a duty to serve one another as if we were serving Christ Himself.
Yet in order for this understanding of Human Dignity to remain unconditional it must remain very firmly anchored into place. In this way the "conditions" for the upholding of a person's Human Dignity do not shift, causing an entire portion of humanity to be deemed "unworthy" and thus eliminated. It was the Judeo-Christian culture, from which the Enlightenment arose, that gave us the end of slavery and the concept of human rights in our Western Civilization. Don't let the Seculars try and tell you otherwise! They are doing their best to re-write history so EDUCATE YOURSELVES. Because:
"The radical detachment of the Enlightenment philosophy from its roots ultimately leads it to dispense with man." (Cardinal Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Culture, pg. 42)
More true words have never been spoken. The roots of the Enlightenment were Judeo-Christian and firmly rooted in GOD. But do remember that it wasn't the Enlightenment that gave us the understanding of Human Dignity. It was Genesis 1:27~
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."
In the Judeo-Christian culture that was born of Genesis 1:27 it became known that all people, from the unborn to the elderly, the crippled, the retarded, the homosexual, the non-religious, the Conservative to the Liberal, and so forth and so on, **all** people enjoy Human Dignity. And thus Freedom and Liberty for All flourishes, with everyone free from abuse, harassment, and elimination. With free speech, freedom of religion (or no religion!). And why? Because even if a person is not Judeo-Christian themsevles, we murder their Human Dignity if we so much as call them a name:
"But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever says to his brother, 'You good-for-nothing,' shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever says, 'You fool,' shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell."
And so the woman on the beach in the bikini? The Prostitute on the street? The heroin addict letting his kids starve? The mentally and physically disabled that shout and rave in public? If you so much as look at them funny you are judged by God as having committed a sin against their human dignity. Why? Because the second you roll your eyes at another or call them a name you relegate them to an inferior status to yourself. In other words, you strip them of their human dignity and make them sub-human. And so every single human being in a Judeo-Christian culture is entitled to respect. Yes, it has taken a long time for this to be reflected in our civil laws but calm down, it takes a good 2,000 years or so for these revolutionary concepts to penetrate deeply into every fiber of multiple cultures. Things don't happen over night! It's not as if the Early Church had Facebook...
So, if we remove the Judeo-Christian understanding of Human Dignity as God-given, the anchor chain snaps. Human Dignity immediately becomes CONDITIONAL, based on a checklist of "worthiness." Just look at the Communist and NAZI management of Human Dignity: only the "fit" and the "young" were entitled to Human Dignity. Anyone that required care from others was a "useless eater" and a "burden on society" that was then eliminated. Killed. Freedom and Liberty flew out of the window: Anyone that disagreed with the Party Line was enslaved, killed, or both. Keep repeating this to yourself until you have it memorized:
Without the Judeo-Christian anchor holding our culture in place, human dignity becomes conditional and is dispensed only to the worthy by the State.
The "second" Enlightenment, the godless "Enlightenment", led directly to Marxism, Communism, Nazism, so-called "Humanism"
and the murder of 100 Million innocent human beings simply because they were not "worthy" of their Human Dignity:
Without the anchor, the goalposts shifted as per the popular whims of the godless "Humanists". (A sick irony there, since these so-called "Humanists" very swiftly de-humanized entire swaths of the population. They were once stopped by our very powerful Judeo-Christian culture in a brutal war and a Cold War - but now that our culture has been severely weakened by Secularism the "Humanists" are working hard to re-establish
conditional human dignity today, re: the unborn. And they are working hard at making it legal to euthanize any "burdensome" person such as the aged and disabled. True "Humanism", GODLY humanism is that which offers UNCONDITIONAL human dignity to all.)
Some of you might think I'm full of it here? Well, I shall leave you with this thought, the "Elephant In The Room" that the Secularists conveniently forget to discuss:
100 Million people, slaughtered in less then one hundred years, lie in their mass graves and give their silent testament to the brutal reality of a truly secular society that has divorced itself from the Judeo-Christian anchor that ensures full Human Dignity for ALL human beings from conception to natural death.
You might be able to argue against me, just one person, "You are such a bigot! You are trying to force your religion down my throat! You don't talk facts!" But just go right ahead and argue with those 100 million victims of the godless Secular cultures that buried them in the Earth...
In the meantime, dear Brothers and Sisters in God, make certain that you have a working knowledge of HUMAN DIGNITY because there is a war on for our very humanity that we are swiftly losing due to our inertia and our weakness in this argument.
